MICHELET 



3780 



MICHIGAN 



beside the scholars and statesmen of Italy's 

 glorious days. The three figures on his tomb, 

 representing sculpture, painting and architec- 

 ture, disclose to posterity the story of his cre- 

 ative genius. R.D.M. 



Consult Kuril's Michelangelo; Steam's Mid- 

 summer of Italian Art. 



MICHELET, me May' , JULES (1798-1874), a 

 French historian of the Romantic School. He 

 was born in Paris and was the son of a master 

 printer. At the age of twenty-three he was 

 appointed professor of history in the College 

 Rollin. While a 

 lecturer in the 

 College de France 

 in 1838, he be- 

 came involved in 

 a bitter contro- 

 versy over the 

 unpopular order 

 of the Jesuits, and 

 in 1851 refused 

 to take the oath 

 of allegiance to 

 Napoleon III. 

 Through this act 

 he lost his offices and incurred the enmity of 

 the Church. He lived mainly in Brittany and 

 on the Riviera, where he devoted himself 

 wholly to literature. Michelet's style appealed 

 to emotion rather than reason, and he was 



JULES MICHELET 



rarely a calm judge of events. In 1867 he fin- 

 ished the great work of his life, The History of 

 France, in nineteen volumes. Other published 

 works include La Femme, Le Banquet, and sev- 

 eral volumes of natural philosophy. 



MICHELSON, mi' kelson, ALBERT ABRAHAM 

 (1852- ), an American physicist, born in 

 Strelno, Germany, whose parents emigrated to 

 the United States when he was a child. His 

 reputation rests largely upon his series of in- 

 vestigations in the velocity of light, his meas- 

 urements being characterized by a high degree 

 of accuracy. The inferential refractometer, in- 

 vented by him, made possible the measurement 

 of linear distances in terms of the wave-length 

 of light. He also devised a spectroscope which 

 enabled him to secure a better dispersion of 

 light than with the prism (see LIGHT). He was 

 graduated at the Naval Academy, Annapolis, 

 in 1873, and took graduate courses in physics in 

 Berlin, Heidelberg, the College of France and 

 the Polytechnic School, Paris. He was ap- 

 pointed professor of physics in the Case School 

 of Applied Science, in Cleveland, Ohio, and 

 later held the same position in Clark Univer- 

 sity. In 1892 he was appointed as the head 

 of the physics department in the University of 

 Chicago. For his discoveries in physics, he was 



awarded the Nobel prize in 1907. Among his 



notable publications is a work entitled Light 



Waves and Their Uses. 



V JLJCHIGAN, mish'igan, one of the 

 north-central states of the American Union, 

 named after the lake which forms much of its 

 western boundary. The word is of Indian ori- 

 gin and probably means great lake or great 

 water. 



Michigan is sometimes called the PENINSU- 

 LAR STATE because it is divided by lakes Michi- 

 gan and Huron into two peninsulas, the upper 

 and the lower. It is popularly known as the 

 WOLVERINE STATE, and as its flower it has chosen 

 the apple blossom. With great natural agri- 

 cultural resources; timber and mines; well- 

 developed and varied industries; splendid edu- 



cational system ; advanced political institutions, 

 and early humane legislation, as embodied in 

 its laws for .the protection of the labor of 

 women and children, Michigan is one of the 

 most interesting states in the Union. 



Size and Location. The northern peninsula 

 of the state seems much the smaller section, 

 yet from east to west its extreme length is 500 

 miles. The state is so surrounded by lakes 

 Michigan, Huron and Erie that no point in the 

 state is more than eighty-five miles from the 

 shore of one of them. Its coast line is about 

 1,600 miles, being greater than that of any 

 other state. Florida and. California rank next 



